Death opens || Vampire Diaries [S1]

Chapter 4: Lady Lazarus

Dying
is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

⁂

NADEZHDA

As I have every time this past week, I wake to the velvet darkness of the early morning when the bed shifts beneath me under the weight of another body. Usually akin to the lightless black at the bottom of the deep sea—a sensory void teeming with the lurking shadows of leviathans and krakens just beyond your floating fingertips—the night has lately been joined by new monsters. These only somewhat less haunting.

I can smell the bourbon on his breath and the angst burning in the air between us. Not that it's a shock to see the effect my words have had on the normally much more suspicious elder Salvatore (and I have my own doubts regarding the anomalous credulity he's displayed where she's concerned), but I do wish there were some words of comfort I could offer him. Instead, all I have to offer are more questions.

From his reaction to my earlier bombshell, it's obvious to me that Damon has no idea the trouble Katherine is in. I doubt he knew she was on the run at all. Although...he recognized her real name so he must have suspected something. Was his love for her really so blind that the thought of her deceit had never occurred to him? No, I know him better than that. The truth is Katherine Pierce has been his reason for living for the last 150 years. I don't know if he knows how to let her go.

Still, it's clear that whatever plan Katerina had to put Klaus off her trail, she never shared it with her human lover. And, as I find it highly unlikely that she would have allowed herself to be caught by her own trap, there is but one obvious conclusion: Katherine escaped, thinking herself free and clear, only to find her death elsewhere. And Damon will never accept that.

Like a spoken invitation to his own internal monologue, he shatters the stillness with a whispered question, "How did she die?"

I open my mouth to speak, but my tongue won't form the letters my mind doesn't know. He reads an answer in my silence. Even in the darkness, I make out the nod and swallow of his stubborn resolve. "She's desiccating in a tomb beneath the old church. She's still alive."

I lay quiet as I digest this new information. The revelation is not terribly surprising despite my decades of ignorance on the subject. Not after that comet put his otherwise inexplicable homesickness into perspective at any rate. But this new information does nothing to resolve my current dilemma. How can I possibly argue him out of this treacherous denial when the only remaining aces up my sleeves are razor-edged? What good are my confessions when they can only bring more pain and not even token comfort?

Seconds turn to minutes and minutes into seeming hours as I grind the thought between clenched teeth, feeling it scream in protest at my refusal to swallow or set it free. It's perhaps inevitable then that long before indecisive molars can crack the thing in two, he slips still as death into breathless sleep.

He's nearly angelic cradled there in soft white sheets and moonlight, and I'm uncertain whether it's relief or jealousy with which I regard him there. Perhaps both. The art of peaceful slumber is not one I've ever mastered, not even with the aid of the ungodly amounts of alcohol he's undoubtedly consumed to achieve it himself. My own demons refuse to be so effectively silenced. Especially the ones I've made myself.

And so, giving up for the third time in as many nights, I rise quietly from the bed (though I doubt an earthquake would wake him from this drunken stupor). I snag my robe from behind the bathroom door and creep quietly into the hallway.